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There is still no planned date for when the country will start accepting visitors, which is directly connected to the rebooting of the tourism industry. Realizing that the topic would come up eventually, Peyrefitte shared some insight from the Government's deliberations as to why they are still undecided on this very important decision:

Hon. Michael Peyrefitte- Attorney General

"Everybody wants to know about the airport. Well, the situation is there is no decision yet on the airport. We thought we had come to a decision in the cabinet and upon getting some consolation with some people. But we decided afterwards to say look, what we thought would have been safe, based on pronouncements made by the World Health Organization and PAHO and other places, that we could have found a safe way to open the airport and have the airport opened by a certain time. However, we found out that some of the studies were not reliable. We cannot enter a scenario where if you make 10 tests only 6 are reliable. So, that is not a safe way to open the airport. And pretty soon we will come to a determination more or less when it will be opened but we don't want to give a date just to give a date. We want to give a date when we know for sure we will be as ready as we possibly can to open the airport. So the airport remains closed for the moment. The borders- western border, northern border, southern border- those remain closed as well. Flights are not coming in. People are not allowed to break the border to go across or to come in, except for those people who have applied to the Foreign Ministry and the Foreign Ministry has gotten approval from the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Immigration, National Security, Civil Aviation. Those people must be belizeans or permanent residents, diplomats, students and the like. So, if you are one of those people, you apply to the Foreign Affairs Ministry, through the Covid19 website and the Foriegn Ministry takes you to a committee and we decide on who can come in based on where they are coming in from and what we have to do to protect ourselves from those people or to have those people protect themselves from us once they come into the country."

Today, pressure group COLA issued a release saying, quote, "we clearly sympathize with the plight of the tourism and other associated industries…

But that is no excuse for the hasty campaign by Tropic Air for the Government to reopen the Philip Goldson International Airport…The commentary by Tropic Air's CEO, Mr. Steven Schulte, unfortunately smacks of greed and putting making profits ahead of the safety and well-being of all Belizeans and especially his own workers.The many cannot die for the greed of a few." End quote.

And speaking of opening borders, reliable reports say that the Melchor border is now closed and under quarantine for 72 hours. This is after the head of Immigration for that Guatemalan border station died suddenly of respiratory failure and then one of his co workers tested positive for COVID-19. The immigration officers working on that shift have all been on mandatory quarantine.

And now, the border has been quarantine and, reports say, no one is allowed to go near the gate that separates the borders.